Lebanon’s Elections

Sometimes things need no explanation

 

A building still bearing the scars of Lebanon's 1975-1990 Civil War

Armenian poster by the March 14 coalition

Outside a polling booth

Two Armenian supporters of the Tashnag party, which is allied to the Hizbullah-led March 8 coalition

Eager to vote for the status quo

At the polling station

Billboards in Achrafieh's Sassine Sqaure promoting March 14 candidates

Supporter of Michel Aoun's FPM

March 14 supporters hand out lunchboxes bearing the images of the coalition’s candidates, notably an image of Nadim Gemayel highly reminiscent of civil war images of his assassinated father.

No Sleep

I’ve only got 14 minutes before my electricity is cut for the daily three hours, so I must make this quick.

I didn’t get any sleep last night as the “fierce clashes” (as the media is calling them, sounds more like war) went on into the night. It’s not so easy to drift off into dreamland when you can hear rockets, gunfire and explosions, some so loud you think you are trapped in the middle of it. At about 2:30am the wind changed, and a massive thunderstorm occured. My mother and I had emerged from our bedrooms and headed for our large balcony, where we were relieved to see the rain start to pour down. We had feared the new noises represented a sharp escalation in fighting. In May, Beirut hardly ever gets rain, let alone a dramatic electrical thunderstorm like that. I don’t believe in God but it’s hard not to see the religious symbolism- nature, if not God, seemed to be sending a direct message to those brainless gunmen to stop killing each other, go home and let Beirut sleep. It worked until the thunder and lightning subsided at about 5:30am, after which the fighting picked up again seriously. It’s now 8.42am and the snap, crackle and pop of fighting is still reverberating through the city. I gave up on sleep hours ago. But it seems as though ‘God’ is still ticked off: it looks like it’s going to storm again.

Most people are at home, hostage to this ridiculous and utterly pointless violence. I am running out of milk (there wasn’t any at the supermarket yesterday, surprise surprise), so I am gonna start to get really annoyed when I can’t have my cup of Earl Grey with milk: a small indulgence when you’re inprisoned in your own home. Stupid gunmen, did they learn nothing from the suffering of their families in the fifteen years of civil war that tore this country apart? Do they really want to repeat that?

(Picture from AlJazeera article. It seems AlJazeera (Arabic/English), Hariri’s Mustaqbal and TV Hizbullah’s Al Manar TV have the best footage of what’s going on outside, but no truly good footage is yet being shown.)